In systems used for identifying items such as products and their components, it is important to accurately track them according to their evolving history, including product name changes, feature changes, manufacture and supplier changes, and other indicia used to identify individual products throughout time. As inter-corporate and inter-organization data exchange in PLM solutions (like Agile's) continues to grow, business processes are increasingly suffering from different standard names for organizations. For example, two companies may store the company name “Philips” as “Philips Ltd” and “Philips Semiconductor Ltd.” Not having the ability to correctly understand the standard names for each organization reduces the ability of PLM solution like Agile to enable automated BOM cleansing for vendor names, and prevents correct part lookups, this making the entire PLM process less efficient. This process is currently done manually in the industry.
With the rapid obsolescence of part numbers, EMS and OEM vendors invest a significant part of their resources to map “dirty” (obsolete, defective, NON-preferred) part numbers to relatively “clean” part numbers (active, low defect, preferred, etc.). Even with a high manual investment, not all parts in a given Bill of Material (BOM) get cleansed at the appropriate time, which leads to returning the BOM back to Designing at a relatively late stage in the production cycle, leading to expensive and often fatal delays. This process is currently done manually in the industry.
With the rapid obsolescence of part numbers, EMS and OEM vendors invest a significant part of their resources to map “dirty” (obsolete, defective, NON-preferred) part numbers to relatively “clean” part numbers (active, low defect, preferred, etc.). Many times, these vendors do not have all the information to correctly map the data, and have to rely on information provided by content partners like PartMiner, Silicon Expert to make the correct decision. This process is currently done manually, with Component Engineers visiting either the Manufacturer web sites, or going to the content partner web sites to get information on part-by-part basis, which is both expensive, and error prone, and very time consuming.